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Sun Java Desktop 2 Review
Anon. writes "Linux.com is carrying a pretty damning review of Sun Java Desktop System version 2. JDS seemed to have issues with almost each and every machine the author tested it on, support was quite bad - and to top it all, the software comes with a seven page license document. Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage?" (Slashdot and Linux.com are both part of OSDN.)
Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage ?"
I dunno. Why are you not asking a similar question of Debian???
Corporate clients are far more interested in stability than in the latest & greatest. Look how long RH goes between updates of their workstation and advanced server lines.
Java Desktop R2 seems to be more of an upgrade to the bundled apps. Nothing really major here.
Do we really need another distro?
Fedora seems to have all the capabilities of JDS, and more. We have an overabundance of distros, far more than would be required for "choice". Choice is great, but really when one choice works perfectly well, why use another?
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
Sun isn't flavour of the month in the media just now, and especially in the "Linux" media, where Sun is considered to be in league with Microsoft and SCO. To expect a fair and balanced review from linux.com is therefore misguided.
Stick Men
All these distro reviews are so superficial. This one was worse than most. Rather than complain about how his fave window manager isn't included, he complains about how he couldn't intall it on his hot-rodded PC. So having not installed it, he doesn't have too much to bitch about.
I'm probably the only one around here who wants to know how a distro functions for the purposes of doing usefull work. Reviews of the install process are pretty pointless, unless your interest is in cloning large numbers of X clients or servers. Next!
So Sun is hoarding Java in the interest of not 'diluting the trademark' and then proudly slaps it on this...
The rest of your comment is troll-ish. If you want people to use your language, you either do a media blitz (Ada, Java, C#, Borland this and that, etc) or else you wait a long time (5-10 years) for word-of-mouth to spread (C, Perl, Python...). I can't think of any languages that just appeared one day and suddenly became popular.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Actually, I'd say Java is far from dead or dying. It's simply proliferating at a market segment that it wasn't originally marketed. Server-side Java development has been growing at a fast pace since the J2EE spec were introduced in the late 90's. If you browse any Java development magazines and articles, you'll see that the focus of Java development has been on server side for a long time. Java, when used in conjunction with plenty of open sourced development tools, makes server-side development easy and fast.
Furthermore, Java is very good as an educational aid for object oriented programming. It's pretty well and cleanly designed and implemented, and the syntax is easily transferrable to any of the C derivatives (except for Objective-C, which is quite a bit different from personal experience). In studying CS, a lot of theories are involved, and it's not necessarily a professional program. So using Java to learn OOP is not a bad thing at all.
-B
BTW, You should probably let IBM know that Java is a dead language. I'm sure Big Blue would be interested in hearing about that.
Umm, yea, you're probably right. IBM's never made any mistakes before over their choice of technology. Why should they now?
Java is an excellent implementation of a pure object oriented language that has a very C-like syntax, an important feature for many persons for some reason, and an emphasis on performance and enterprise-suitibility that makes it suitible in many situations that (for example) stock Python would not be. The fact that it was at one point overhyped has nothing to do with the fact that it has many positive points and many good applications and uses.
I think a more apt comparison than Fortran or Cobol would be to Pascal. Both are problematic languages in some ways but Java is excellent for teaching, for the same reasons Pascal was. If you want to teach someone how to write good OO code-- and in most cases, once you get past the simple "here's how to build and traverse a linked list using pointers", outside of maybe an Operating Systems course this is in fact what most instructors these days want to teach-- then Java is vastly preferable to the many distractions, and perversions of the object orientation concept that C++ offers. Java therefore offers a great compromise between the basic tenet of CS teaching (you want to teach *how to program*, not *how to program using C++* or *how to program using Java*) and the desire of instructors to offer something that students will be at least more likely than not to have a practical use for once they get out into "the real world" (as opposed to, say, LISP).
-- Super Ugly Ultraman
That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil
In future, if Sun really wants something it can call the Sun Java Desktop, it would have all the applications in Java, and a Java runtime which is perfectly integrated into the OS, like OS X's Java environment.
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WAP Apache software
See... we can never have a decent debate on Java because the Java sycophants mod anything critical to troll status. This wasn't meant as a troll. A few people brought up some really interesting things here. Just because I have my criticisms of the language and its practicality and integration in with something like Sun Java Desktop doesn't mean this is off topic or a troll.
Modding me down doesn't change the reality that corporate-controlled computer languages that don't really offer anything unique to the industry don't have a long term future. That's my opinion, but I guess if you disagree with me, then I'm a troll.
One of the big problems with reviewing a linux distro is the difference between a general review and an end-user review. In the former case you are obligated to give a wide spread and be fair, understanding that some problems are specific to your configuration and hardware compatibility is a difficult problem. In the latter case explaining everything that went wrong with your configuration is relevant-- as worst-case scenarios are important to some readers, and the average reader is not going to find it worth their time to bugger about with SATA drivers for hours-- but may not be fair, as your use is not at all emblematic of all installations of the distribution in question.
He did everything right.
First, he made a reasonable attempt to install it. He tried several computers; he tried both the graphical interface and the text one. If there had been a "check media" option (like RedHat's installer has), I'll assume he would have used it, given the other steps he took. Defective media is understandable. But we don't know that's the problem, because they didn't provide a way to check. Why not?
Then he called support. He didn't use any special reviewers-only support channel. He called the normal number like everyone else has to. He got the same horrible support experience. And he criticized them for it. Why do we just let large companies off for having horrible support? Why don't we yell and scream until they do better?
Um.. the fact you are discussing the Java Language in an article about the "Java Desktop" Linux distribution does, in fact, make it off topic. That is, in fact, the definition of "off topic".
Score:-1 is obviously an unfair rating for your Java comment. However I am fucking sick and tired of every single person who formulates their opinion poorly saying that any non-positive response that they recieve is due to some kind of jihad of "zealots" with moderator points trying to quash discussion. Maybe people are disagreeing with you (and with other people who use this "oppressed by sycophants" theory) because they disagree with you, not because they're "zealots"? Because the alternative is to adopt the theory that everyone who gets moderator points is a simultaneously "zealot" for Sun Microsystems, for Apple, for Linux, for Microsoft, against Sun Microsystems, against Apple, against Linux, and against Microsoft. That's a lot of biases for one person to hold.
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As for "troll", well, if you're a troll, it's because you make statements like this:
Modding me down doesn't change the reality that corporate-controlled computer languages that don't really offer anything unique to the industry don't have a long term future
Without solidly establishing or even providing a compelling argument that either of the following statements are accurate:
- Corporate-controlled computer languages that don't really offer anything unique to the industry don't have a long term future.
- Java is a corporate-controlled computer language that doesn't really offer anything unique to the industry.
And yet you state them to be "fact".Umm, yea, you're probably right. IBM's never made any mistakes before over their choice of technology. Why should they now?
But you aren't arguing that Java is "bad" or a "mistake". You're arguing it's dead. The point is that its use by IBM, and the large number of customers who have adopted Java by way of IBM, seem to indicate Java is very far from "dead", and in fact has a very significant customer pool.
Yes, now all they need to do is spend the 6 billion in cash they have and stop grossing 1+ bill in revenue per quarter.
Their hardware is more expensive, and slower.
Do 400,000+ transactions per hour 24/7 on your home built pc and get back to me.
Their OS is less feature rich, but has more bugs, and doesn't perform as well in most cases as Linux.
I guess if you want your corporate IT department to rival that of a medium sized College, you could squeeze extra performance out of Linux.
And as to Java... I'm not sure exactly how they intend to make money there... IBM does the Java services market SOOOO much better than Sun does.
They are going to use the FOSS model. Give it a way and include a link to paypal for donations.
Jesus-friggin-Christ, go spend $10 and buy yourself a decent Intel NIC.
Regular PC's put most of their emphasis on processor speed, not speed in the rest of the system. SPARC has insane amounts of cache, obscene amounts of I/O. Sort of like having to choose between a Ferrari on dirt roads with lots of ruts (x86) or an SUV on paved highways (Sun). Marketing has once again ruined the right way to do a job. Intel has provided us with the white trash model of computer architecture - spend all your money on your car and live in a shack.
Before you all think I'm a doofus, hear me out:
1. There are a bunch of already-existing and very high quality Linux distributions, all of which make a huge number of very useful packages available. So, Sun weighs in with a Beta distribution which includes almost no packages other than their custom Sun stuff?
2. With all the aforementioned very high quality Linux distros out there which are more or less unencumbered by license issues (besides GPL, which we all like), Sun encumbers its new O/S with a seven page license agreement?
3. With all the downloadable distros which can be had for no more than bandwidth costs, Sun goes with a subscription model? And then provides shaky support to boot?
4. With all the other distros offering a league of choices, KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, etc, configurable on a user-by-user basis, Sun forces you into using only one specific window manager across the board?
5. And, sun releases this system without (apparently) adequately testing their installer against popular types of hardware?
Like I said, maybe it's me, but this is kind of a "WTF" moment for me. Why is Sun trying to reinvent the wheel like this? Why are they doing so much to make their distro much weaker than existing ones? What's going on?
I thought their rotating windows trick was kinda cool, but I think I'm going to stick with Slackware and OS/X on my machines. I've got the JDK installed on both, and Eclipse, too. It seems to be working a lot better than their new setup...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I guess Sun deserves what it gets, but I think the reviewer was a bit irresponsible. Perhaps he had a deadline and couldn't wait around for replacement media (assuming that you still couldn't rule out defective media) or for Sun support to resolve the issue
Whether or not you think the reviewer could have done more -- the reviewer definately did more than Joe User would. If a reviewer 'only' tried installation on three or four computers, that's still three or four more than most people have access to.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
If you want the system management utilities and development tools they must be installed afterward.
I wonder when Sun are going to get their act together and start fixing the basic toolchains available on their environments. We work on Sun slices at work, and we're prevented from having access to all sorts of basic tools we need.
Now I can understand wanting to restrict access to compilers, scripting languages, etc.
But perl *is* available on the environment, yet the halfwits who set policy in our server sections prevent us from having access to tools like less (yes, we have to use more, tail and head forall of our gigabyte-log-scanning needs because the version of vi on these environments won't read long lines or too-long files); vim (sigh) or (perhaps less controversally) lsof.
And the reason?
These are disallowed for 'security reasons'.
This is the second place I've worked at where my team has been limited like this. When are Sun going to get a clue and learn to install the basic tools geeks need to be happy?
Until they do - avoid Sun.
Believe with me, my saplings.